Harbor Computer Services Helps Businesses Succeed
Name: Harbor Computer Services
Services offered: Managed services, solution design and implementation, vendor management, and more
Website: www.harborcomputerservices.net
“Symform has helped us solve a serious problem for our clients, and they really appreciate it.”
In business since 1999, Harbor Computer Services provides proactive IT support and complete technology solutions to small businesses throughout southeastern Michigan. “We have pretty much every kind of customer you can imagine,” says company president Amy Babinchak. “Accounting firms, engineering firms, small manufacturing firms, and then one of pretty much everything else. It’s just sort of the way the market works out here.”
Babinchak takes pride in her company’s dedication to its clients. “Our motto is ‘we care about your business,’” she says. “We’re a relationship firm. We come up with the best solution to make each customer’s computer problems go away for good.”
The Challenge
Part of fulfilling that mission is helping every client implement a solid business continuity strategy. But until recently, that was easier said than done.
“Small business owners know that protecting their data is important, but it’s pretty easy to put off,” says Babinchak. It’s also easy to do poorly. “Often, the person responsible for backups was the lowest-ranking person in the company,” Babinchak notes. “They were essentially taking the entire company home with them in their car every night.”
What her customers needed, Babinchak saw, was an automated, offsite storage solution. Finding one suitable for small businesses, though, proved to be difficult. Some products utilized per-gigabyte pricing that saddled clients with constantly rising backup costs. Others were consumer-oriented services that lacked the encryption functionality many of her customers desperately needed. “The available solutions either were affordable but not sufficiently secure or secure but too expensive,” Babinchak says.
The Solution
Then, while attending a technology conference in 2009, Babinchak discovered the Symform Cloud Storage Network, a business continuity solution that securely backs up data over the Web onto unused storage resources contributed by the service’s users. “I was immediately interested,” she says. “I saw right away that this was something completely different than anything else on the market.”
For starters, Symform’s solution is available at flat per-machine, per-month prices that stay the same no matter how much data you store. It’s also extremely secure, since it utilizes AES-256 encryption and scatters data in fragments across thousands of servers all over the Internet. “No one site has enough pieces to make sense of anything,” Babinchak notes. “It’s really an ingenious way to keep data safe and available.”
Furthermore, the Symform Cloud Storage Network is highly automated, so there’s no more worrying about whether or not customers are backing up their data properly. “Any time data protection involves an end user remembering to do something, you’re asking for trouble,” Babinchak observes. “With Symform, backups just happen on their own. That means no dependencies for us and no inconvenience for the client.”
Plus, Symform’s solution is dependable and speedy as well. “A backup solution is only as good as your ability to get the data back,” Babinchak says. “With Symform, we can always retrieve data when we need it, and the restore time is much faster than any other solution we’ve tried.”
Last but not least, Babinchak has been delighted with Symform’s technical assistance. “We’ve developed a really great relationship with their support team,” she says. “We haven’t had to call them too often, which is nice, but whenever we’ve had questions they’ve done a great job of answering them.”
The Results
Symform has also done a great job of helping Harbor Computer Services safeguard client data. In the past, offsite storage wasn’t a practical or affordable option for many customers. Thanks to Symform, though, it’s now a standard part of every managed service plan Babinchak offers.
“The great pricing and security make us really comfortable rolling Symform into everything we do,” Babinchak says. “Instead of being something we wished our customers could do eventually, business continuity is now something all of them are doing today.”
As a result, Babinchak adds, Harbor’s clients are even more satisfied and loyal than before. “For us, it’s always about customer retention, so any time we can provide a better solution we do,” she says. “Symform has helped us solve a serious problem for our clients, and they really appreciate it.”
Looking ahead, Babinchak plans to take advantage of a Symform feature that allows users to automatically copy a complete backup to a specific server outside the Symform Cloud Storage Network. “Many of our customers will be interested in having a copy of their data in their home, say, just in case,” Babinchak notes. “It’s just one more way Symform helps me take good care of my clients.”